It really is just starting, today in fact with the first congressional hearings on the matter of the cover up.
Yes, it was a cover up, and cover ups have a way of blowing up.
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Politics loom as new facts emerge in Libya probe

WASHINGTON The State Department now says it never believed the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a film protest gone awry, giving congressional Republicans new fodder for criticizing the Obama administration's initial accounts of the assault.

The State Department's extraordinary break with other administration offices came in a department briefing Tuesday, where officials said "others" in the executive branch concluded initially that the protest was based, like others in the Middle East, on a film that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad.

That was never the department's conclusion, a senior official told reporters.

The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a hearing Wednesday on diplomatic security in the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The attack as become a political football in the final weeks before the election.

The committee's chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has accused the State Department of turning aside pleas from its diplomats in Libya to increase security in the months and weeks before the attack in Benghazi. One scheduled witness Wednesday, Eric Nordstrom, is the former chief security officer for U.S. diplomats in Libya who told the committee his pleas for more security were ignored.

U.S. memo warned of high risk of Libya violenceTop U.S. counterterrorism adviser in Libya amid questions over securitySecurity dwindled before deadly Libyan consulate attackBriefing reporters Tuesday ahead of the hearing, department officials were asked about the administration's initial -- and since retracted -- explanation linking the violence to protests over an American-made anti-Muslim video circulating on the Internet. One official responded, without specifying, that it was a question for others to answer.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter, and provided no evidence that might suggest a case of spontaneous violence or angry protests that went too far.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Republican lawmakers have increasingly sharpened their criticism of the administration's initial explanation of the attack. They said they never accepted the original explanation.

It was a top administration diplomatic official, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who gave a series of interviews five days after the attack that wrongly described the attack as spontaneous.

She said that the administration believed the violence was unplanned and that extremists with heavier weapons "hijacked" the protest against the anti-Islamic video. She did qualify her remarks to say that was the best information she had at the time. Rice since has denied trying to mislead Congress.

A concurrent CIA memo obtained by The Associated Press cited intelligence suggesting the demonstrations in Benghazi "were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo" and "evolved into a direct assault" on the diplomatic posts by "extremists."

"A lot of people got the information wrong. Part of the problem is that ... this needs to be an investigation into the facts and what it's come to is a debate on politics in an election year," senior correspondent John Miller said on "CBS This Morning."

Nordstrom, the former security official in Libya, addressed the diplomatic security issue in an Oct. 1 email to a congressional investigator. He said his requests for more security were blocked by a department policy to "normalize operations and reduce security resources."

A memo Tuesday by the Oversight Committee's Democratic staff provided details of Nordstrom's interview with the panel's investigators. In that interview, Nordstrom said he sent two cables to State Department headquarters in March 2012 and July 2012 requesting additional diplomatic security agents for Benghazi, but he received no responses.

He stated that Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary for international programs, wanted to keep the number of U.S. security personnel in Benghazi artificially low. He said Lamb believed the Benghazi facilities did not need any diplomatic security special agents because there was a residential safe haven to fall back to in an emergency.

Nordstrom's Oct. 1 memo to the congressional investigator said, "You will note that there were a number of incidents that targeted diplomatic missions and underscored the GoL's (government of Libya) inability to secure and protect diplomatic missions.

"This was a significant part of (the diplomatic) post's and my argument for maintaining continued DS (diplomatic security) and DOD (Department of Defense) security assets into Sept/Oct. 2012; the GoL was overwhelmed and could not guarantee our protection.

"Sadly, that point was reaffirmed on Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi."

Attached to that memo was a list of 230 security incidents in Libya between June 2011 and July 2012 in a report that ultimately concluded that "the risk of U.S. Mission personnel, private U.S. citizens, or businesspersons encountering an isolating event as a result of militia or political violence is HIGH."

I've been watching those hearings live, and was struck by another issue raised: the estimated number of shoulder-fired SAMs capable of shooting down an airliner that were left lying in the Libyan desert after Ghaddafi fell for anyone to drive off with -- and they did -- was at least 10,000-20,000, maybe MANY more. We had been assured Libya's military arsenal was being safeguarded.

Another hearing factoid: The embassy's defenses were designed to withstand a four-man offense for 15 minutes, despite repeated requests for a much more robust defense, as required by regulations given its official threat level. This 9/11 attack was by an estimated 100 professional military-equipped terrorists.

If I thought, for a second that you guys were genuinely interested in a discussion on how to improve our worldwide embassy protections, rather than blast Obama, then maybe a two-way dialect would transpire.

If I thought, for a second that you guys were genuinely interested in a discussion on how to improve our worldwide embassy protections, rather than blast Obama, then maybe a two-way dialect would transpire.

Oh but I/we are.
Remember "Bush lied, people died"?
This is full circle, "the chickens, are coming home, to roost".

The opaque walls of transparency are finally coming down with our foreign policy failures.
Listen to what Lara Logan has to say about all of this, if you are truly interested, as you say you are.

NW30, my take-away from Logan's speech was that she's a supporter for perpetual war with the Islamic world. It's like a war on weeds, foolishly thinking that you can end weeds in our time. The sad part of reality is that so much has be wasted, particularly in human life, thinking that we can remake the world in our vision and protect ourselves from those that don't think like we do.

I can hardly wait until we exit Afghanistan, and leave them to their own fate.

NW30, my take-away from Logan's speech was that she's a supporter for perpetual war with the Islamic world. It's like a war on weeds, foolishly thinking that you can end weeds in our time. The sad part of reality is that so much has be wasted, particularly in human life, thinking that we can remake the world in our vision and protect ourselves from those that don't think like we do.

I can hardly wait until we exit Afghanistan, and leave them to their own fate.

So it doesn't bother you that BHO continues to go around spiking the death of OBL football, still saying that Al-Qaeda is on their heels, in retreat, and that we are winning the war on terror, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth?
You don't mind being lied to?

This coverup is well on its way to becoming the biggest and deadliest deliberate coverup in the history of the presidency. The evidence is mounting fast that the entire administration, certainly Sec Clinton, are guilty of covering their asses to avoid revealing before the election that Al Qaeda is expanding, not shrinking, that the Sec of State and the White House are complicit (to condense pages of factual explanation into one accurate word) in the ambassador's death, and that the entire coverup was a coordinated effort to conceal the truth from the American people. Even the far left media are starting to agree with TR and the centrist and right wing news media on this undeniable conspiracy.

But despite the guilt, the lies, and the now fully documented violation of the president's self-admitted Prime Directive to protect his people, the left's entire response here will consist of fart jokes, Fox News slurs (even though it was on most cable news media much of the day and in some left wing newspapers), and accusations of racism.

NW30, you're buying the BS from the right, and frankly, I'm not. You have to admit that Bin Laden saw his maker under President Obama's leadership. That was a big accomplishment for those that wanted some accountability for the guy responsible for masterminding the 9/11 attack in NY.

Now all the posturing about Afghanistan, the Taliban and al Qaeda is what anyone trying to end things there will come up with, regardless of party. All the being lied to crap is just that. I can't believe that you're so fooled by what is coming out of the right these days. You're old enough to remember the BS about getting out of Viet Nam under the Nixon Administration. We all knew it was an exit strategy, and it was something that was sorely needed at the time, even after 58K American soldiers died there. It was a terribly foolish endeavor, and it remains a stain on America's hubris during the Cold War years.

Now about what happened in Libya, and all the blame that some would like to dump on the Obama Administration is just opportunistic crap. Right wing nutcases seeing an opening in a blatant attempt to embarrass President Obama during the election cycle. Hopefully you're smart enough to know that it's impossible to prevent any and all unfortunate events that happen in the world virtually every day. Then again, maybe you're not. Do you want to see yourself in isobars' corner foaming at the mouth all the time sounding like someone itching for war somewhere in the world? One wonders whether some of these off-the-top chickenhawks would be willing to pony up a big tax surcharge on their income to promote war in the world, or would they hide behind Grover Norquist and his "no tax" pledge.

NW30, you're buying the BS from the right, and frankly, I'm not. You have to admit that Bin Laden saw his maker under President Obama's leadership. .

Sorry, but your guy just happened to be in the chair when he was found.
It didn't matter who was prez at the time he was located, the wheels had long been in motion since the first 9/11.
Now we are on the second one.
As for the rest of your schpeel, yeah, okay, you've got your world view.

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